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London 2012: Oscar Pistorius makes history but Blade Runner debate goes on

LONDON—There was the time when Oscar Pistorius rode his dirt bike through a field of tall grass, clipped a boundary fence, and turned around to see one of his legs hanging from a coil of barbed wire.

Fortunately, the South African has got legs that come off.

South Africa's Oscar Pistorius and Grenada's Kirani James exchange name bibs after the men's 400m semifinals on Sunday. Kirani won the heat and advanced to Monday's final. Pistorius finished last and was eliminated. (JOHANNES EISELE / AFP)

Advantage: Pistorius.

They’re “normal’’ looking limbs, with feet shaped like, well, feet, that go into ordinary shoes. Those are the charismatic 25-year-old’s walkabout prostheses, for everyday wear, not his working pair of underpinnings.

The latter are shaped like scythes, made from carbon fiber and silicon-sleeved, and known — in the merchandise catalogue of their Icelandic manufacturer — as Flex-foot Cheetahs.

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Advantage Pistorius?

Or disadvantage, weirdly, for the able-bodied athletes who line up against him on the track?

The debate will undoubtedly rage on about The Blade Runner, as he’s known. But Pistorius’s dream of making the 400-metre final is over, with a last-place finish Sunday in his semifinal. He’s still expected to run in the 4x400 relay starting Thursday.

Of course, unlike any other track athlete competing at these Games, Pistorius will enjoy a Second Act as participant in next month’s Paralympics, the Olympic undercard where he’s already collected four gold medals in the past, 2004 and 2008. He is, to his critics, disabled of convenience, when it suits.

Arguably the most inspirational story of London 2012 — who didn’t get just a bit choked up as he clack-clack-clacked around the track in his Saturday heat, making history as the first non-able-bodied Olympian (I don’t know quite how else to put it) competing alongside and on an equal footing. First, it should more accurately be stated, to appear in the glamorama Games without intact biological legs, and fast enough to qualify for Sunday’s semis.

At the end of the race, and Pistorius did very much bring up the rear, the winner, Kirani James of Grenada, immediately sought out the South African and asked to trade athlete bibs — swapping his “James’’ for a “Pistorius’’ — and the Johannesburg native was obliging. So he’s a star down there among fellow athletes as well, because they appreciative being part of something momentous. No opponent here has come out and said Pistorius shouldn’t have been permitted to take his mark amongst them. Yet Michael Johnson, the iconic double-gold medallist who still owns the record in the 400 has expressed a differing view, and I think speaking what plenty of other people who do take their sports very serious are thinking.

“We don’t know for sure whether he gets an advantage from the prosthetics he wears,’’ Johnson told the Daily Telegraph. “It is unfair to able-bodied competitors.’’

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It’s not a popular position to take. Further, it can’t be proven one way or another, not with the diagnostics currently available, which are maddeningly speculative, and not with the advocates in his corner clearly acting as cheerleaders rather than dispassionate evaluators.

How can any advantage possible accrue to someone who doesn’t have legs in a fleet-of-foot contest? Pistorius, born without a fibula in both legs – the long bone running along the outside of the leg from below the knee joint down to the ankle — underwent double-amputation when merely 17 months old. He doesn’t remember the feeling of legs and he was never able to walk. “I never knew what it was like to have proper legs because I never had them, I never missed (them),’’ he told his biographer.

Now he runs in the fast lane, someone who grew up rejecting any physical limitations, playing rugby and water polo and wrestling and turning to sprinting when a doctor advised it would be good therapy while rehabbing knee ligaments torn during a violent rugby tackle.

Charming and handsome — voted South Africa’s sexiest man by one magazine — and the beneficiary of multiple endorsement contracts, Pistorius was anointed one of the pin-up athletes for these Games, his face and advertising posters ubiquitous around town. None of this can possibly be begrudged him.

That Pistorius made it to these Games — lawyering up after initially banned by the IAAF in 2007 — is a victory for inclusivity. Except … except … the very essence of the Olympics is about exclusivity, the human form at its most magnificent. What Pistorius presents is an extremely well-tuned and ferociously trained three-quarter body on top of custom-constructed artificial legs. The longer term scenario is rife with ethical problems. Can science make sports, as we know them, unrecognizable some day?

Is Pistorius doing the running or are those scientifically engineered legs doing it?

There are clear disadvantages in his steel blades. He can’t get propulsion jumping out of the blocks and must pull into the race to start. He doesn’t have the side-to-side motion that assists runners in the turn. He obviously doesn’t have ankles to generate power. In his case, that power must come from the hips.

Does he have an aerobic advantage once he stretches out in the race, with his longer stride? Johnson — who knows Pistorius personally and genuinely likes the guy — believes so. Tenets of fair play matter and nothing about the science of Pistorius is irrefutable.

He almost had me convinced when pointing out this week that, if artificial limbs were the advantage some claim, then athletes who use them, the dedicated professionals in the sport, should be routinely breaking the 50 second mark in the 400 at the Paralympics and they don’t. His personal best is 45.07. “If these legs are able to provide such an advantage, then how come everybody else isn’t running the same times?’’

It’s down to him, Pistorius means, not the Cheetahs.

In his Sunday semi, he posted a time of 46.54 and was perhaps the happiest competitor in the stadium, just for getting to this moment.

“The whole experience is mind-blowing. My aim was to make the semifinal. It’s a dream come true.’’

And good for him. I’m still not sure, however, if it isn’t a bit of a mirage.

Pistorius, like many athletes, has a tattoo. He got it on a sleepless night in New York City. It’s a biblical verse, from Corinthians: “I do not run like a man running aimlessly.’’

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